Excerpts for Woman Upstairs

The Woman Upstairs

Random House, Inc.

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

How angry am I? You don't want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.

I'm a good girl, I'm a nice girl, I'm a straight- A, strait- laced, good daughter, good
career girl, and I never stole anybody's boyfriend and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and
I put up with my parents' shit and my brother's shit, and I'm not a girl anyhow, I'm over
forty fucking years old, and I'm good at my job and I'm great with kids and I held my
mother's hand when she died, after four years of holding her hand while she was dying,
and I speak to my father every day on the telephone— every day, mind you, and what
kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because here it's pretty gray and a
bit muggy too? It was supposed to say "Great Artist" on my tombstone, but if I died right
now it would say "such a good teacher/daughter/ friend" instead; and what I really want
to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL.

Don't all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it,
how in touch we are with our fury. We're all furies, except the ones who are too damned
foolish, and my worry now is that we're brainwashing them from the cradle, and in the
end even the ones who are smart will be too damned foolish. What do I mean? I mean the
second graders at Appleton Elementary, sometimes the first graders even, and by the time
they get to my classroom, to the third grade, they're well and truly gone—they're full of
Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and French manicures and cute outfits and they care how their
hair looks! In the third grade. They care more about their hair or their shoes than about
galaxies or caterpillars or hieroglyphics. How did all that revolutionary talk of the
seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good?
Even worse on your tombstone than "dutiful daughter" is "looked good"; everyone used
to know that. But we're lost in a world of appearances now.

That's why I'm so angry, really—not because of all the chores and all the making nice
and all the duty of being a woman—or rather, of being me—because maybe these are the
burdens of being human. Really I'm angry because I've tried so hard to get out of the hall
of mirrors, this sham and pretend of the world, or of my world, on the East Coast of the
United States of America in the first decade of the twenty- first century. And behind
every mirror is another fucking mirror, and down every corridor is another corridor, and
the Fun House isn't fun anymore and it isn't even funny, but there doesn't seem to be a
door marked EXIT.

At the fair each summer when I was a kid, we visited the Fun House, with its creepy
grinning plaster face, two stories high. You walked in through its mouth, between its
giant teeth, along its hot-pink tongue. Just from that face, you should've known. It was
supposed to be a lark, but it was terrifying. The floors buckled or they lurched from side
to side, and the walls were crooked, and the rooms were painted to confuse perspective.
Lights flashed, horns blared, in the narrow, vibrating hallways lined with fattening
mirrors and elongating mirrors and inside- out upside- down mirrors. Sometimes the
ceiling fell or the floor rose, or both happened at once and I thought I'd be squashed like
a bug. The Fun House was scarier by far than the Haunted House, not least because I was
supposed to enjoy it. I just wanted to find the way out. But the doors marked EXIT led
only to further crazy rooms, to endless moving corridors. There was one route through
the Fun House, relentless to the very end.

I've finally come to understand that life itself is the Fun House. All you want is that door
marked EXIT, the escape to a place where Real Life will be; and you can never find it.
No: let me correct that. In recent years, there was a door, there were doors, and I took
them and I believed in them, and I believed for a stretch that I'd managed to get out into
Reality—and God, the bliss and terror of that, the intensity of that: it felt so different—until
I suddenly realized I'd been stuck in the Fun House all along. I'd been tricked. The
door marked EXIT hadn't been an exit at all.